Bridge Dreams

It was one of those days where I wanted to live instead of doing what I told myself would give me meaning. I want to put on my black and white lace dress and haphazardly explore the world in my big brown boots.

I ran up the first 50feet of the incline, turned back, grabbed your hand, and pulled you towards me as I continued to run up the bridge of my dream. You were so shocked by my sudden gesture that you didn't have time to say no. All you could see was the shadowy movement of my dark silhouette (it was night). All you could hear was my laughingly encouraging voice that reminded you about that day, not so long ago, when this was the substance of life and the reason to wake up in the morning.

Wake up! She says. We have a world to conquer.

CupCakes

The photos are enough. Let's bake.

On the question of comparativism versus interdisciplinarity

If there is always this notion of justice involved in translation and comparativist practice, are we not limiting ourselves in our conceptions of what a comparativist practice looks like? How does the notion of treating objects of knowledge with respect affect our practice of object-making? Respect or justice are not neutral terms that lead us to objectivity but, in themselves, are mechanisms of objectification, a mode of knowledge production that functions within limitations to understand an object that functions as disciplines do.

When Foucault speaks of cutting and descending as a genealogy, as opposed to a linear and casual genealogy, he turns our attention towards a blind field (that of descent) where terms like "justice" and "humanist" cease to exist.

Genealogy does not resemble the evolution of a species and does not map the destiny of a people. On the contrary, to follow the complex course of descent is to maintain passing events in their proper dispersion [...] an unstable assemblage of faults, fissures, and heterogeneous layers that threaten the fragile inheritor from within or from underneath.

Being just and noble, for Foucault, is impossible within a system that reproduces subjugation under the auspices of justice, as an ideology that is a condition of humanist practice that assumes a whole and universal identity as the starting place of human heritage and history. Being in the darkness of descent, "disturbs what was previously considered immobile; it fragments what was thought unified; it shows the heterogeneity of what was imagined consistent with itself (146-147)." Justice, respect, and value are a few of terms of consistency that emerge as heterogeneous in the descent.

Taking into account how context, epoch, and language color any writer, philosopher, or theorist--as Braudel and Carr, and to a lesser extent Alberuni, alert us to--to what extent is a comparativist and/or interdisciplinary (are they the same?) approach deemed as such because of its process, the actual practice of bringing together disparate worlds or ways of knowing worlds; or, on the other hand, turned towards the question of process itself, questioning processes, as the practice of a comparativist? To relish always in the blind field, or to write always along fissures and margins that a "humanist heuristic" exists outside of (or where it does not exist at all)? What is the negotiation between anti-humanist realities, contexts and times continually erasing and re-creating worlds (reality as referring to the desire for an unchanging truth) and humanistic intentions that are locked in the borders of limited and sovereign ways of knowing?

Is Alberuni a receptacle? Is the comparativist a mechanism that has no responsibility over what she contains? How can Alberuni's work be, "nothing but  a simple historical record of facts?" It is problematic that we even think this is possible. The comparativist work is in the act, the process, which becomes the purpose, the distinction, between the historian and the comparativist. So she works as the historiographer, examining methods while simultaneously engaging the blind field? What worlds are possible and, furthermore, can possibilities that emerge from masteries and dissections be the concern of comparativist or interdisciplinary work? Is the unsaid part of the process of doing comparativist work? Is there even a possibility of doing a work like Foucault's for Khaldun and/or Alberuni? Should this be the question we ask and does it matter whether or not this is considered a just question to pose?

If the question is how we construct our objects of knowledge within systems (disciplines) of totality, than is the focus on the object or the process of object-making? Is it about mapping the fissures or falling into the spaces between the fissures? As Foucault leaves us:

It is no longer a question of judging the past in the name of a truth that only we can possess in the present; but risking the destruction of the subject who seeks knowledge in the endless deployment of the will to knowledge.

Ecritures do Sao Paulo

I was reading about citizenship when I was compelled to write this. Maybe I wrote it to you, maybe not. I wanted to share it with you:

Racontes-moi quelques histoires de Sao Paulo. Je veux pas cette vie quotidienne de travail et répétition. Je veux pas penser des ides plus grand que demain. Je veux savoir le monde du maintenant; l'air de notre temps que nous ne pouvons pas se refaire.


Alors, rappels-moi, monsieur de mes vacances, de ma vie de la monde de sud. Je me souviens notre conversations et mes espoirs pour les demains et les lendemains. C'était vrai? C'était juste? Tu m'as dit Un, deux, trois...notre temps a passé.

Et quelle dommage, n'est pas? Que nous nous pouvons pas vivre sans condition, sans responsabilité. Quand quelqu'un me demander je veux répondre

Because it is never enough. It is never, ever, ever enough for me to just say, "it's time to go home now." Home may be in exile, as I tell my friends, but exile always was a relief; not becuase it was easy, but because it was hard. And every moment, the weight of every moment, felt like the load of eternity that rests on Atlas' poor shoulders. Each decision gave birth to or executed potential: the sweet possibility of something...something...else. Else-where. Else-whom. Else-to. Else-from.